


heart song

by deadwine



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Do Kyungsoo | D.O-centric, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Excessive Use of Nature Metaphors, Gen, Gen Work, Grief/Mourning, Heartache, I'm like...devastatingly in love with Kyungsoo's voice and words, Moving On, Music Video: That's Okay (D.O.), Slice of Life, pet death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-16 23:41:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28715178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadwine/pseuds/deadwine
Summary: Grief teaches Kyungsoo that his heart is an instrument. It demands practice, it demands time.Without labour, it withers.
Comments: 30
Kudos: 30
Collections: Challenge #12 — EXO's Universe





	heart song

**Author's Note:**

> this is heavily inspired by the music video and the lyrics for that's okay. it's coming a little after kyungsoo's birthday but here it is nonetheless.

All night  
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling  
with a luminous doom. By morning  
I had vanished at least a dozen times  
into something better.  
\- Mary Oliver, Sleeping in the Forest

Meokmul dies on Seoul’s most overcast January morning in ten years. Kyungsoo’s body is leaden, unamenable and his heart a battered old manuscript buried six feet under the ground.

The world doesn’t hold still for the shock to subside and he goes through the motions of his day as always, hands and feet beating to familiar rhythms.

Home is a water-logged cavity in the center of his body and all night he lies stock-still staring at the ceiling, uneasy body warring with a vacant mind.

*

The tears come in the morning, when he chances upon the uneaten dish of dog food in the kitchen. He cries until he feels like a towel hung on a rack— wrung out and dry, the pinch of a clothespin on his lungs.

*

His grief carries him all the way through the next month.

He lives from one bout of painful remembrance to the next, masochistically digging into the hollow of his own chest— man marring memory, man haunting ghost.

*

On the last day of February, he finds a plant— _a cactus_ — on his doorstep. It's in a small bronze pot with a white polka pattern, broad thorned leaves clumped together, facing upwards. There’s no note attached but the coupons for food delivery tucked underneath it tell him all he needs to know. He sighs wearily— he brings it inside.

He puts it carelessly on the window ledge and looks for his phone. Might as well order some food, he thinks. But his phone floods with anxious vibrations the second he turns it on and Kyungsoo shrinks as the energy seeps out of him.

He goes back to bed.

*

Kyungsoo resents it— the space it seems to take up immeasurable to its actual size. He’s keeping it out of pity, he tells himself; he doesn’t want a prickly, fragile thing to have to fend for itself.

_I don’t want another living thing to die in my hands._

*

While on a phone call one afternoon in April, he begrudgingly waters it— a _Christmas_ cactus, according to Naver. It has withstood his indifference somehow.

*

Huchu, he names it, before even noticing that he’s been calling it that in his head. Huchu, for his cloudy eyes every time his fingers catch on its thorns— not unlike biting into a peppercorn. Huchu, for something dead.

(Huchu, for something loved.)

*

Mid-June is sweltering hot and the sudden weather change racks shivers through his body, bed soaked in sweat and anguish. The leaves start to droop and Kyungsoo, _oh_ he is but helpless to the tears that overtake him.

A week passes thus. Strangely, the world doesn’t end. The temperatures drop and Kyungsoo gets out of bed in the early evening to a fridge stocked with an assortment of stews, a cooker brimming with rice.

Huchu is covered in a brown paper bag and next to it lies a list of instructions written with Jongdae’s characteristic care: it needs sunlight but likes the dark. It prefers humidity. You need to water it more often. Love you.

 _Love you_.

Kyungsoo’s heart is a tremolo on the violin, the sound of the strings too painful to carry till the last note.

*

In July, he starts taking walks again. The grass teases his toes through his open sandals and on the days when his walk coincides with a post-rain dampness, its smell carries to his doorstep, as if the earth is keening, eager to have him back in its arms.

*

He runs into Jongin at the park at dusk one day. Jongin’s greeting is a brittle smile: an apology. Kyungsoo isn’t sure what to make of it until the tug at his ankle, Jjangah peering up from between his legs.

The journey home is a haze. He barely just beats the downpour against his windows— the drops on his glasses, its only damage. His heart rumbles as the lightning cracks overhead. He’s angry, he realises— betrayed.

 _I thought you had healed_ , Kyungsoo thunders.

*

Some days he wishes he was on the window-sill himself, resilient and unwavering in the face of bad weather and turbulent keepers.

*

Chanyeol sends Kyungsoo links to his indie finds every night; Baekhyun sends memes. When Kyungsoo’s eyes grow accustomed to autumn on his doorstep, he catches himself humming to Huchu. His heart tenderly waters the soil in which the plant is rooted.

*

November sprouts a bud on one of the lower leaves. Kyungsoo rises each morning surprised that it’s still there— _that they both are_ — pushing his thumb down on the ridge below the bulb. The red spot on his finger dulls next to the bud’s bright cardinal.

*

Kyungsoo’s heart flowers on Christmas Day, radiant red with streaks of white.

But Kyungsoo doesn’t see it— doesn’t know he’s loved, still. That the earth sings to him still. He lies asleep on a tear-tracked pillow, too overwhelmed by the dread of an anniversary.

Sometimes grief is an unmarked date on the calendar.

*

On January 11th, he wakes as he always does: before the dulcet beeps of his alarm, and warm. Something sits on his ribcage, light but with a pull to it. He sits up and puts on his glasses, rubbing at his eyes. He lifts his shirt and freezes halfway through an exhale.

On his right rib, right where an old scar is fading, from when Meokmul scratched him as a puppy, a tiny bud sprouts. Kyungsoo dare not touch it and yet his fingers trail up his abdomen, resting right below the shoot. The thrum against his hand is gentle— relentless.

A mild breeze slips in through a gap in the window, ruffling his hair. A glance outside shows him cloudless skies. Kyungsoo walks over and puts Huchu on the ledge. He pushes the window fully open, letting in the scent of the earth.

**Author's Note:**

> i was also influenced by [my blue hen by ann gray](https://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/forward-prizes-for-poetry/ann-gray/ann-gray-my-blue-hen/) and my heart by corinne luyken while writing this
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/deadseoull)   
>  [cc](https://curiouscat.me/deadwine)


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